An American Haunting (Unrated Edition) Reviews

i'm left with a bit of want on this one.

the movie starts out in modern times with a girl having a nightmare. her mom takes a doll and a envelope from her that she had found in the attic. the envelope is somehow an entire journal....flash back....the rest of the movie except one more scene at the end. now i liked "neverending story" and its use of this kind've back jump related to a modern reading....but here its just absolutely unnecessary.

the actual story is set in history....and supposedly "based on true event's" aka people existed in history so this could've happened...whatever. in short: a man and his family is haunted by a demon/ghost/thing. they all suspect its brought on by a woman that he has wronged because he charged her 20% interest which was "against the church". really long build up till the man actually goes to the woman and tells her to kill him and be done with the curse...she says "you brought it on yourself". so despite all the confusing (is it a dream or not type sequences are abundant) and frankly uninformative scenes (almost none of the "clues" could be brought together to make any sense of them), the brief flashback scene ties together a story (a sort've "lets end this" by showing you clips of scenes that make a story....not see how the clues that you could've guessed fit together...but rather these are parts that make a story of it).
i'll admit the premise was not what i expected, which was nice. but the getting there was sort've messy. held my attention. acting was solid, filming was nice, story was good overall; its just that in the end there was no real "build up" only a "revelation" that ended the story. heavy handed sermon on morality and revenge.
and then we have another modern scene which was flat out stupid and almost entirely unrelated. bad choice. seriously anyone who watches this should skip all the "modern" part of this movie. it should've hit the cutting room floor and never seen the light of day. down to the fact that the acting, the script, the filming, and the story are all bad while the rest of the movie is good.

and thats what leaves me unmoved.
filmmakers, artists, writers, etc, a note: don't beat your audience over the head with messages...generally we're not stupid and if we are...what do you care?